This week we talk about the PKK, Turkey, and the DEM Party.

We also discuss terrorism, discrimination, and stateless nations.

Recommended Book: A Century of Tomorrows by Glenn Adamson

Transcript

Kurdistan is a cultural region, not a country, but part of multiple countries, in the Middle East, spanning roughly the southeastern portion of Turkey, northern Iraq, the northwestern portion of Iran, and northern Syrian. Some definitions also include part of the Southern Caucasus mountains, which contains chunks of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

So this is a sprawling region that straddles multiple nations, and it’s defined by the presence of the Kurdish people, the Kurds, who live all over the world, but whose culture is concentrated in this area, where it originally developed, and where, over the generations, there have periodically been very short-lived Kurdish nations of various shapes, sizes, and compositions.

The original dynasties from which the Kurds claim their origin were Egyptian, and they governed parts of northeastern African and what is today Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. That was back in the 8th to 12th century, during which Saladin, who was the sultan of both Egypt and Syria, played a major historical role leading Muslim military forces against the Christian Crusader states during the Third Crusade, and leading those forces to victory in 1187, which resulted in Muslim ownership of the Levant, even though the Crusaders continued to technically hold the Kingdom of Jerusalem for another hundred years or so, until 1291.

Saladin was Kurdish and kicked off a sultanate that lasted until the mid-13th century, when a diverse group of former slave-soldiers called the mamluks overthrew Saladin’s family’s Ayyubid sultanate and replaced it with their own.

So Kurdish is a language spoken in that Kurdistan region, and the Kurds are considered to be an Iranian ethnic group, because Kurdish is part of a larger collection of languages and ethnicities, though many Kurds consider themselves to be members of a stateless nation, similar in some ways to pre-Israel Jewish people, Tibetan people under China’s rule, or the Yoruba people, who primarily live in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, but who were previously oriented around a powerful city-state in that region, which served as the central loci of the Ife Empire, before the Europeans showed up and decided to forcibly move people around and draw new borders across the African continent.

The Kurds are likewise often politically and culturally powerful, and that’s led to a lot of pushback from leaders in the nations where they live and at times operate as cultural blocs, and it’s led to some very short-lived Kurdish nations these people have managed to establish in the 20th century, including the Kingdom of Kurdistan from 1921-1924, the Republic of Ararat from 1927-1930, and the Republic of Mahabad, which was formed as a puppet state of the Soviet Union in 1946 in northwestern Iran, following a Soviet push for Kurdish nationalism in the region, which was meant to prevent the Allies from controlling the region following WWII, but which then dissolved just a few months after its official formation due to waning support from the Kurdish tribes that initially helped make it a reality.

What I’d like to talk about today is the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and why their recently declared ceasefire with Turkey is being seen as a pretty big deal.

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The Kurdistan Worker’s Party, depending on who you ask, is a political organization or a terrorist organization. It was formed in Turkey in late-1978, and its original, founding goal was to create an independent Kurdish state, a modern Kurdistan, in what is today a small part of Turkey, but in the 1990s it shifted its stated goals to instead just get more rights for Kurds living in Turkey, including more autonomy but also just equal rights, as Kurdish people in many nations, including Turkey, have a long history of being discriminated against, in part because of their cultural distinctiveness, including their language, manner of dress, and cultural practices, and in part because, like many tight-knit ethnic groups, they often operate as a bloc, which in the age of democracy also means they often vote as a bloc, which can feel like a threat to other folks in areas with large Kurdish populations.

When I say Kurdish people in Turkey have long been discriminated against, that includes things like telling them they can no longer speak Kurdish and denying that their ethnic group exists, but it also includes massacres conducted by the government against Kurdish people; at times tens of thousands of Kurds were slaughtered by the Turkish army. There was also an official ban on the words Kurds, Kurdistan, and Kurdish by the Turkish government in the 1980s, and Kurdish villages were destroyed, food headed to these villages was embargoed, and there was a long-time ban on the use of the Kurdish language in public life, and people who used it were arrested.

As is often the case in such circumstances, folks who support the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which is often shorthanded as the PKK, will tell you this group just pushes back against an oppressive regime, and they do what they have to to force the government to backtrack on their anti-Kurdish laws and abuses, which have been pretty widespread and violent.

The PKK, in turn, has been criticized for, well, doing terrorist stuff, including using child soldiers, conducting suicide bombings, massacring groups of civilians, engaging in drug trafficking to fund their cause, and executing people on camera as a means of sowing terror.

Pretty horrible stuff on both sides, if you look at this objectively, then, and both sides have historically justified their actions by pointing at the horrible things the other side has done to them and theirs.

And that’s the context for a recent announcement by the leader of the PKK, that the group would be disarming—and very literally so, including a symbolic burning of their weapons in a city in northern Iraq, which was shared online—and they would be shifting their efforts from that of violent militarism and revolution to that of political dialogue and attempting to change the Turkish government from the inside.

Turkish President Erdogan, for his part, has seemed happy to oblige these efforts and gestures, fulfilling his role by receiving delegates from the Turkish, pro-Kurd party, the DEM Party, and smilingly shaking that delegate’s hand on camera, basically showing the world, and those who have played some kind of role in the militant effort against the Turkish government, that this is the way of things now, we’re not fighting physically anymore, we’re moving on to wearing suits and pushing for Kurdish rights within the existing governmental structures.

The founder of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, got in on the action, as well, releasing a seven-minute video from prison, which was then broadcast by the PKK’s official media distribution outlet, saying that the fighting is over. This was his first appearance on camera in 26 years, and he used it to say their effort paid off, the Kurds now have an officially recognized identity, and it’s time to leverage that identity politically to move things in the right direction.

Erdogan’s other messages on the matter, to the Kurdish people, but also those who have long lived in fear of the PKK’s mass-violence, have reinforced that sentiment, saying that the Kurds are officially recognized as a political entity, and that’s how things would play out from this point forward—and this will be good for everyone. And both sides are saying that, over and over, because, well, child soldiers and suicide bombings and massacres conducted by both sides are really, really not good for anyone.

By all indications, this has been a very carefully orchestrated dance by those on both sides of the conflict, which again, has been ongoing since 1978, and really picked up the pace and became continuous and ultra-violent, in the 1980s.

There was an attempted peace process back in the 20-teens, but the effort, which included a temporary truce between 2013 and 2015, failed, following the murder of two Turkish police officers, the PKK initially claiming responsibility, but later denying they had any involvement. That led to an uptick in military actions by both groups against the other, and the truce collapsed.

This new peace process began in 2024 and really took off in late-February of 2025, when that aforementioned message was broadcast by the PKK’s leader from prison after lawmakers from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party worked to connect him and the Turkish government, and eventually helped negotiate the resulting mid-May of 2025 disarmament.

Turkey’s military leaders have said they will continue to launch strikes against PKK-affiliated groups that continue to operate in the region, and the PKK’s disarmament announcement has been embraced by some such groups, while others, like the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is tied to the PKK, but not directly affiliated with them, have said this truce doesn’t apply to them.

Most governments, globally, have heralded this disarmament as a major victory for the world and Turkey in particular, though the response within Turkey, and in Kurdish areas in particular, has apparently been mixed, with some people assuming the Turkish government will backtrack and keep the DEM Party from accomplishing much of anything, and worrying about behind-the-scenes deals, including a reported agreement between Erdogan’s government and the DEM Party to support Erdogan’s desire to transform the Turkish presidential system, which would grant him more direct control and power, and allow him ...